By Gideon Levy

The dogs no longer bark as the army convoy passes. The hospitals in Gaza and Israel are filling up with casualties, including more and more children and babies, and yet no one cries out and the defense forces are unmoved.

(jongetje Khaled Wahba naar zijn begrafenis)

Last week we related the story of baby Khaled Wahba, whose pregnant mother and brother were killed in an army operation in Gaza, and who was lying paralyzed in Dana Children’s Hospital in Tel Aviv. With his uncle Mohammed by his side, between last Sunday and Monday, Khaled took his last breath. He was just a year and a half old.

Mohammed Moghrabi is also 18 months old. He was wounded by another missile, in another assassination operation, somewhere else in Gaza. Shrapnel damaged his visual cortex and blinded him. This week, he awoke after three weeks in a coma. He may also be paralyzed. His mother was injured, and his uncle and cousin were killed in the failed attack. Only his grandmother sits by his bedside at Hadassah University Hospital in Ein Kerem, in the pediatric intensive care unit.

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Not far away, at the Alyn Hospital for disabled children, Hamdi Aman was informed this week that his daughter Maria, three-and-a-half years old, will apparently remain paralyzed and on a respirator for good. Maria lost her mother, brother, uncle and grandmother to an army missile. Hamdi has been by her side for weeks. Every so often, he places his cell phone at Maria’s ear and lets her hear the voices of her aunt and cousin, pretending to be her dead mother and brother on the line. Last week, Maria began to draw using her mouth. Hamdi also received a special computer from the hospital, so that she can learn to use it with her cheek – one of the few parts of her body that she can still control, as she is paralyzed from the neck down. She has started talking again. Meanwhile, her father has painted her tiny, motionless fingernails with red polish.

The hope that was still keeping Hamdi going last week, that Maria might one day stand again, has apparently vanished; his terrible disappointment is plain to see. At 27, the missile made him a widower, an orphan and a bereaved father, with a young daughter who will be permanently paralyzed. On Sunday, her pretty face was marked with suffering and pain.

Hardly anyone comes to visit them – the grandmother with her grandson in Hadassah, and the father with his daughter at Alyn – and they are unable to leave the hospital. They sit there day and night, for weeks, next to their tiny loved ones, with no family support and hardly any financial help. All alone in their tragedies, living in constant fear that the children will be forced to return to Gaza. Their homes there are without electricity and water. Only the horror is growing during this all-consuming war.

This week, Mohammed Moghrabi was taken out of bed and sat in a chair for the first time since his injury. Surrounded by cheap stuffed animals that his grandmother bought for him in Ramallah, wearing only a diaper, the toddler’s expression is unreadable. Mohammed doesn’t see the dolls. His eyes dart hither and thither, his pupils directed upward, as if searching for something. He doesn’t move his left leg and his right one was injured by shrapnel. Doctors say they can’t fully assess the scope of his injury.

Will Mohammed be permanently blind? Paralyzed? A piece of shrapnel from the missile pierced his temple, traversed the frontal lobe of his brain and exited from the other side of his skull, wreaking havoc and damage along the way. It happened during the failed attack on a vehicle carrying Grad missiles that was driving in Gaza; the second missile fired by the Israel Air Force killed seven bystanders along the crowded main street and also wounded Mohammed.

Since the incident, on June 13, Mohammed’s grandmother Samiya Moghrabi, 58, has barely budged from her grandson’s side. He is the son of her daughter Nasrin and her son-in-law Akram, a couple with two young children who live in a one-story building on Saladin Street in Gaza, one of the main traffic arteries in the area.

Samiya is a cheerful woman, but the weeks she has spent in the hospital in the foreign city, in the foreign country, have taken their toll, despite the excellent treatment she is getting from the doctors, other staffers and visitors. One brings her food, another comes to ask how she’s holding up. Her smile sometimes turns to tears: This week she asked if it would be possible to get a talking doll for her blind grandson.

The telephone rang at her home that morning. “Your daughter and grandson have been injured,” she was told. By the time she got to Shifa Hospital in Gaza, Samiya was informed that the tragedy was much greater than she thought: Akram’s brother, Ashraf Moghrabi, 29, and his son Maher, 8, had been killed, along with Ashraf’s 14-year-old brother-in-law, Hisham. Samiya saw that her daughter Nasrin suffered injuries in the face, leg and chest. Mohammed was unconscious.

Akram recalled that his brother Ashraf left the house to go to his hairdressing salon, but returned because he’d forgotten his cell phone at home. When they heard the first missile they rushed to shutter the windows. Then the second missile fell.

Upon seeing the child’s condition, the doctors at Shifa decided that Mohammed had to be transferred to Israel. Mohammed’s other grandmother had lost a son and a grandson, it would be nearly impossible for his young father to obtain an entry permit, the mother was injured – and so Samiya had to accompany and attend to him. Late at night, once all the permits were obtained, an ambulance brought Mohammed and Samiya to Hadassah, via the Erez checkpoint. She was away for just one day when she was allowed to go to Ramallah to visit a sister whom she was not permitted to see for the past six years. There she bought the doll for Mohammed.

All day, Samiya sits and reads to him from a Koran with a cover of gold-embroidered fabric, which she made long ago. “I read to myself and to Mohammed,” she explains. She sleeps on the chair next to him. A social worker gives her NIS 50 a week; the source of the money is unclear. Samiya also lets Mohammed listen to his mother and father on the phone every day, though she’s not sure what he understands. “We want you back, Mohammed, Come back to us, Mohammed. We’ll bring you toys. Talk to us, Mohammed!” the family shouts into the phone.

Samiya did the same when Mohammed was in a coma and says that his body trembled when his mother’s voice came on the phone. “The whole family talks with him, so he’ll feel that the family is with him,” she says, starting to weep quietly. She talks to him too, to reassure him: “Soon Daddy will come, and he’ll buy you a toy. Mommy will come soon. You’re with Grandma.”

The IDF Spokesman: “The IDF assault on June 13 was aimed at a vehicle that was carrying a terror cell on its way to launch Grad missiles at communities and strategic facilities on Israel’s home front. The initial firing at the vehicle was done only after it was identified traveling on an open road devoid of other vehicles or civilian population. After it was determined that the first strike did not destroy the weapons that were in the vehicle, a second volley was fired. In the seconds in which the decision-makers had to determine what to do, none of the means of observation indicated any potential for the gathering of a crowd, or the possibility of striking uninvolved individuals. Only in the final seconds before the vehicle was hit, was the crowd of people around the vehicle noticed, and at that point any diversion of the missile would not have changed the extent of injury to the surrounding crowd.

“The IDF makes a supreme effort to prevent harming noncombatants. Many planned assaults are canceled, despite their clear operational necessity, when it is evident that there is a risk to the civilian population located in the vicinity of the target.”

The respiration tube in his nose bothers Mohammed, who restlessly turns his head from side to side. Before he was wounded, he knew how to say “Daddy.”

Dr. Ido Yatziv, director of the pediatric intensive care unit at Ein Kerem, says that because of the momentum of the piece of shrapnel that entered his head, neurological damage was caused that is as yet impossible to measure. Thus, it is still too early to tell whether the toddler’s blindness is permanent.

The Hadassah doctors will meet soon to decide on the continuation of Mohammed’s treatment. They would like to transfer him to the Alyn facility, but who will pay for it? Who will pay for the rehabilitation of a small child, wounded and blinded by our military forces?

Tal Manor of Physicians for Human Rights has appealed to Defense Minister Amir Peretz: “I am writing to ask that you immediately and without delay instruct the relevant authorities to take full responsibility for the boy’s treatment.”

Two weeks have passed and there has been no reply.